Scientists are engineering microscopic viruses to help in the building of smaller, lighter power supplies for a variety of devices.

View a video of fruit flies displaying unusual courtship behavior. View power words for this article. Fruit flies linger over a bowl of rotting fruit. To untrained eyes, the flies may look like a swarming nuisance, but scientists have found that flies’ swoops and buzzes are ways to send signals through the crowd. Another, less obvious way these insects communicate is through chemical signals called pheromones. (It’s easy to think of these chemical signals as being similar to smells.) Scientists have long known that pheromones may play an important role in reproduction — certa...

What does fizz taste like? In bubbly beverages like soda or champagne, tiny bubbles give the drink a lift — and have a distinct taste. Scientists have long wondered how we taste these bubbles. In a new study on mice, scientists have connected that fizzy-taste sensation to the ability to taste sourness. Scientists previously thought the taste of bubbles comes from the bubbles bursting on the tongue — but that idea may have to change, says Charles Zuker. A neuroscientist, or a scientist who studies the brain and nervous system, Zuker is now at Columbia University in New York. He and his te...

Giant mammals went extinct thanks to climate, comet and people

What if the solution to one problem causes other problems down the road? That may be the case in the ongoing struggle to fight the flu. Flu season is almost here, which means more and more people may be taking Tamiflu in the months ahead. Tamiflu is a popular anti-flu drug that treats both seasonal flu strains and the new H1N1 flu, an unpredictable disease better known as swine flu. But this increased use of Tamiflu may be introducing new problems. A team of Japanese scientists recently studied three rivers in Japan and found them to be contaminated with Tamiflu’s active ingredient, oselta...

Her scientific name is Ardipithecus ramidus, and scientists call her Ardi for short. She is ancient — her bones are 4.4 million years old — and is making scientists think about the distant past in a whole new way. Ardi is an example of an extinct species that may help scientists understand how human beings evolved the way we did. She is a hominid, which means she belongs to the same evolutionary family as people. It’s not clear whether Ardi was a direct ancestor of humans. Scientists have just published more than a dozen studies on Ardi’s species — and this is just the first wave...

View the question sheet / student exercises at the bottom of this article.When Persi Diaconis was a kid, his favorite hangout was the magic store. He and his friends goofed around, practiced their tricks and longed for the books and tools. Then one day, in walked the world’s greatest living magician. Diaconis, a thirteen-year-old whippersnapper, decided to show off his card tricks. The great magician, Dai Vernon, was so impressed that he decided to teach the teenager a few new things. Each time the pair met in the shop, Vernon taught Diaconis a bit more. And within a year, Vernon offered ...

For a pair of squirrel monkeys named Sam and Dalton, the world recently got more colorful. Male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind, which means they have trouble seeing those colors. But now, thanks to an experiment by scientists at the University of Seattle, Sam and Dalton see things differently—they seem to be able to see red and green. Animals (including people) are able to see different colors of light thanks to proteins in the eye. Proteins are important building blocks of cells, and different kinds of proteins serve specific purposes in a living organism. When an imp...

How old are the objects you can see in the sky? The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius , is believed to be about 200-300 million years old. The Sun and Moon are much older—about 4.5 billion years old. New pictures taken by a telescope in space show ancient galaxies that blow those numbers away. Some of these images show galaxies that are about 13 billion years old. The universe itself is only about 13.7 billion years old, so these galaxies formed when the universe was very young. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is part of one team tha...

Among dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex may be the most familiar. At 20 feet tall and twice that long from snout to tail, this beast was no doubt a scary sight to any smaller animals that crossed its path. It had a large head, strong legs and tiny arms, and T. rex was one of the fiercest dinosaurs to roam the Earth from about 90 million to 65 million years ago.A newly found dinosaur skeleton, discovered in China, look a lot like the remains of a T. rex. Its head was large, compared to its body, and its strong legs suggest the animal was quick on its feet. Despite these similarities, there’s a ver...

Halloween is right around the corner, which means scary movies are playing at the theater and trick-or-treaters are shopping for costumes. This year, there’s no need to go looking for spooky thrills and chills in graveyards — inspiration can come from nature. Consider the case of fire ants and phorid flies. Fire ants are venomous pests that roam the southeastern United States and pack a powerful punch with their bite. Originally, fire ants came from South America, but they accidentally travelled to the United States in ships years ago and their populations grew quickly without any natural...

Dee Boersma was studying penguins in Argentina when a local official announced a new plan. “He wanted to build a boardwalk over 197 [penguin] nests right before hatching,” says Boersma, a conservation scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle. She knew the project would scare the birds and harm their babies. “That was upsetting to me and to others.” Boersma snapped into action. First, she hid the lumber for the project, so construction couldn’t begin, even though she knew she might get in trouble for interfering. Then, she battled lawyers and the governor. After all, she ...

In the chair at the dentist’s office, nitrous oxide is better known as “laughing gas”—it’s used to knock out patients during uncomfortable procedures. That’s not the only place where laughing gas shows up, however. Nitrous oxide from Earth also ends up in the stratosphere, that portion of our atmosphere about 5 to 30 miles overhead. Up there, it’s no laughing matter. Nitrous oxide in the stratosphere is already dangerous for life on our planet, and according to a new study, it may become even more dangerous in the near future. To understand why nitrous oxide is dangerous, it�...

In the video game Tetris, players try to pack as many shapes as possible into a small space. According to a new study, that’s not all they’re doing: Scientists found a connection between playing Tetris and the size of part of the brain. It sounds like a joke, but the study uses serious science. A team of three researchers from Canada and the United States scanned the brains of 15 adolescent girls, aged 12-15, who played Tetris. The scans showed that after 3 months of playing the block-stacking game, gray matter in the girls’ brains was thicker. (Gray matter is the wrinkly mixture of bra...

As you fall into deep sleep, some neurons pause their electrical activity.